Friday, February 1, 2013

I took the opportunity in the
summer of 1992 to personally interview my new friend, Whitney R. Smith.The following is a capsulation of that
interview revealing the broad experience of this noted architect.

Obie: What are some of the
differences between when you were a student and a student today; and what do
you think is good and bad about those differences?

Whit: Well, of course, there are
lots of them. When I was at SC, in '29, we still had the Beaux-Arts system, and
we had it for about two years. We were working on problems and sending them to New York for judgment.
That finally changed right about '30, right after the stock market crash. It
was during that five years that I was at SC. Generally the spirit of the school
changed from doing just classical architecture and following the Beaux-Arts
format of teaching and using teachers that were trained in the Beaux-Arts. All
of us were taking two years of French because we were all supposed to go to France and
study in the Beaux-Arts. The whole thing was kind of silly looking back. All of
which suddenly became impossible when we hit the worst part of the depression.

So, the language got dropped and
all of us got more interested in "modern" architecture. But it took
quite a while. It took about five years before it happened because our teachers
didn't know that Frank Lloyd Wright had just built five buildings in Los Angeles.

There were people like Shindler
who had just arrived on the scene and Neutra and a fellow named Kem Webster who
was the teacher I liked the best. When he left and went to ArtCenter,
I followed him up there and that was in my fourth year. I got permission to
leave SC and take my design work at ArtCenter and USC at the
same time so I was right at the midst of change between academy architecture and the modern movement.

Obie: Did you take life drawing
all the way through, I mean all the years or just one year?

Whit: Well, no. That was just one
year, then water color and sculpture and things like that. But the rest of it
sounds just like it does now. Materials and specifications and so called
working drawings and of course, history. There were at least two years of
architectural history and we used Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. There is a
beautiful satire on the subject A History
of Architecture on the Disparative Method by Forrest Wilson.

And, of course, we finally kind
of laughed at Fletcher because in the first place there were only about five
pages on Oriental architecture. Well, in my opinion, if you're really going to
have a history of world architecture about half of it should be Oriental and
the other half should be European. And so we started making ground stick ink
drawings, and all the different capitals and all that kind of stuff, big
stretch water color paper and ground charcoal and stick ink and made all these
things to start with. None of which has anything to do with anything today.

I don't know much about
architectural education today, except for the few people I know, and the people
who come and ask me what school they should go to. I knew when Cal Poly San
Luis Obispo was doing so great, they had something like thirteen hundred
students. I could recommend it because I knew some of the teachers that were
there. I was a visiting lecturer there and I got to know a little about it.
Right now, I don't know anythingabout
architectural schools except I do know that every four or five years a new
group of architect teachers come in and if they are post modern teachers that's
what the graduates know and do when they get out of school. So it can change
almost every five years, the style and approach and everything depending on who
is teaching where and what.

When I went to school there were
only two accredited schools in the state, Berkeley and USC. That was the only
choice you had if wanted to go to an accredited school. Now of course there are
more, and splinter schools have broken off and graduates from SC and others
have formed their own schools. All I can judge is from the design that comes
out and I don't feel that the present young architects are fired up like we
were when we finally got through the apprenticeship.

Obie: I think of the Smith and
Williams office building in Pasadena
as a classic, maybe even the classic example of the Southern
California architecture of its time. It was an outgrowth of the
post and beam glass panel house. I've always thought of it as one of the best
examples of the type. Do you think that's a fair appraisal?

Whit: The building was built for
five different firms that were just starting up, just incubator small time,
almost one person firms. We designed the building specifically for them. It was
interesting, I don't know anybody else that's done that. We often worked
together. Sometimes we would go in as a group. Trying to get a city hall job in
Salinas, we
took all five guys with us to the interview. Some had written books; we had the
books there: traffic, city planning, art, landscape or whatever they had
written about. We said these are the guys that are actually going to work on
the job, they're in our office and here are the books they have written. So we
beat out Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for instance, doing our presentation. It
was a really good idea, we called it Community Facilities Planners (CFP). We
did over forty jobs doing that. Wayne Williams, my architectural partner for 27
years was the one who thought of the idea of a collaborative of five small
offices, each with a different discipline. Smith and Williams, architecture;
Eckbo, Dean and Williams, landscape architecture; John Kariotis, structural
engineering; Simon Eisner, city planning; and Selje and Bond, interiors. For a
while, it was a very interesting way to develop a sales pitch that was truly
good. We could beat out the guys that had sound/motion picture presentations.

Obie:What about post World War II modern
architecture?

Whit:There were quite a group of people trying to
do their darnedest to do the best they could, and I think that was about '50,
'54 or '58. To start out with it wasn't a very big group. When I first got
licensed in '41, if you were really into modern architecture – it meant
European International style, Bauhaus and like that. There were only about six
architects that you could find. But following that from '46 and '50 on there
were The Case Study Houses. I was involved in two Case Study Houses in which
"Arts and Architecture" magazine had a strong impact on everybody.
Everybody was reading it and everybody was trying to get their stuff published
there. There is no such medium today that I know of which you can depend on to
have a principle and policy about arts and architecture like it did.

Because of our exposure in
"Arts and Architecture" Egardo Contini, Quincy Jones, and I were
selected to do a cooperative housing project in Brentwood.
That was really an unbelievable challenge where five hundred housewives would
be the client and we would have all these meetings and interviews and
committees on whether there should be a gas stove, or an electric stove, and
all this kind of stuff. It's also unbelievable to realize that the Federal
government was against mixed groups, meaning minorities and whites, saying they
were opposed to it. In fact to get an FHA loan you had to sign saying that you
weren't going to have any minorities in the group; now it's just the opposite.

The co-op housing, Mutual Housing Association, was
considered a success from the standpoint that 100 homes and a nursery school
were actually built even though the balance of the 500 homes never materialized
due to some insurmountable problems. Those who are talking "affordable
housing" these days might take a hard look at the few co-ops that were
built in the 1947-49 era. However, in today's climate, it might be considered
"un-American" as it does away with the developer's profits.

Obie: Didn't you work for Harwell
Harris? Why don't you tell me a little bit about that?

Whit: Harwell had a small office
and about a year before had done his first house which had become nationally
famous because somebody had copied the floor plan of it and won a competition
with it. So, there was this big hubbub, how it wasn't fair, that Harwell should
have won the competition because this guy had copied the floor plan that
Harwell had used. Now it doesn't seem like it's a very unusual floor plan, they
had placed a courtyard between the garage and the house. Architecturally it was
all based on Frank Lloyd Wright's work.

Anyway, it was an interesting
small office. I enjoyed it. My tenure there was very short. I would have to
guess it was six to eight months. Harwell thought every job he had was the very
last job he would do so he put everything into it. I enjoyed all that intensely.
So I got to know him very well, of course, and his wife who ran the office.

Obie: Was the work primarily
residential?

Whit: Mostly residential. I
worked on GrandviewGardens, a restaurant in
L.A. Chinatown.

Obie: Was there a lot of burn out
on the part of the employees if he was pushing that kind of intensity?

Whit: I don't think that. Except
he would assign you a project, and it was like working for a writer or
somebody, you weren't sure every line you drew wasn't a wrong line. You worried
about whether you were going to please him or not. He would come by at the end
of the day and take your stuff home and he'd work on it and come back and say
we ought to be doing this instead of that. But I was making a little bit of a
living at home at nights by doing renderings for people. I did a lot of
renderings.

Obie: What medium were your
renderings, typically?

Whit: They happened to be
charcoal pencil and water color combination. I got that from Kem Weber.

Obie: How do you mix those? The
charcoal's going to dissolve in the water color.

Whit: That's part of the deal.
These are charcoal pencils, not stick charcoal.

Obie: Are you charcoaling both
before and after you put the washes of color on?

Whit: Sort of both. Well, what
you do is you have different grades of pencil and then you have a board brush
or some soft brush to make it look more like an etching line, maybe even
slightly fuzzy or something like that. And then if you want to, you can fix it
by doing water color over, and it's been pretty well set by brushing it in.

It doesn't dissolve the hard line
sketches. So it turned out that a number of the guys that came from Germany and Holland like Kem Weber
used that same medium.

Obie: How about Neutra?I remember he had some drawings that had some
wonderfully fuzzy lines on them.

Whit: Well some of that was
charcoal.

Obie: I always thought it was
pastel. Maybe it was both.

Whit: Maybe both. Because I used
pastel in conjunction with the water color and I still do. It takes a very
gauzy air brush to make those smooth things, but you can brush in pastels and
use it too.

I enjoyed renderings and I still
do. Of course where I learned perspective was in the movie studios because we
had to make drawings every day. Maybe one, maybe more than one, two, three or
four. The better guys were fast, I wasn't very fast but you had to make these
drawings and a lot of the time you had to make them in perspective depending on
what angle lens the camera was going to use. You put on the sketch what angle
lens was going to be used and you learned different things which architects
don't normally learn about perspective when you change that lens. In addition
to that, some of the guys knew how to project back from a perspective drawing
into the working drawings.

At the time we had motion picture
cameras that would go through the models. We could make the models and take the
motion picture cameras through the things. People think that's fairly new, but
we were doing it at that time. I'm just saying I learned a lot about
perspective from the studios so I could do it easier and faster than a lot of
people, and I enjoyed it.

Obie: You were and are friends
with John Lautner. Tell me a little bit about how you and John met and a little
bit about the early days you guys had together.

Whit: Well, let's see, who was
John working for? He was working as a draftsman for architect Doug Honnold.
There so few architects doing modern work that we all knew each other and could
meet and all that. So, we knew John fromhis work and he landed in LA partly to do supervision on Frank Lloyd
Wright's work. Of course, as you know, he studied with Wright in Taliesin West
and East and maybe now is accepted as the most successful graduate from
Wright's school. He's finally being recognized in a lot of published material.
Where I got to know him best was when they assigned architects to work in San Diego on war housing,
about '42 or '43. There were very few architects in San Diego, so the government was hiring and
sending them to San Diego..
There was lots of war housing being built in San Diego for the aircraft workers from the Los Angeles area. John and I roomed together. It was very dull
work; we hated the fact that it was even called war housing.

We finally got to do a shopping
center in San Diego.
The National Housing Agency prescribed Earl Giverson of San Diego and me as the associated architects
for the project. I did all the architecture and architectural drawings for the
shopping center. That was one of the first shopping centers that had peripheral
parking for deliveries and the rest of the parking inside for customers. It was
out of scale and it was too large. It was almost all wood because at the time
you couldn't use any metals due to the wartime restrictions. So that part of it
was really fun, to work on the shopping center. It was built and published all
over the place as being a new idea. So that's where I got to know John, and
we've kept in touch all the time and been on a few forums together. He's
finally now being recognized and he just took an exhibit of his work and a
lecture to Vienna
and Vancouver.

Obie: You've been in Sonoma for how long?

Whit: For years.

Obie: And you are doing a little
bit of development right now?

Whit: Just my work remodeling
houses I've purchased for investment or remodeling on buildings in South Pasadena that we
own. I'm not doing it for a client. I think that would be very difficult. There
are 29 architects in Sonoma
and a few of those, maybe a third of those do not do anything in Sonoma. The style that's
considered indigenous to Sonoma
doesn't appeal to me at all. I basically don't think there are any, what I
would call, good architects in Sonoma.
What the newspapers publish is so poor it affects client appreciation.

About two weeks ago the Press
Democrat had a thing about some designer or contractor who was following Greene
and Greene's ideas of simplicity and use of materials, and doing this wonderful
stuff and it had pictures of these houses.

Obie: Could you tell it wasn't a
real Greene and Greene?

Whit: It didn't look like
anything. I figure I may be one of only fifty or one hundred people that
understood what a terrible mistake it was for the writer who wrote it and the
guy who built it. What a terrible misuse of the example. So, I'd be very
surprised that I could find a client that I could even talk to in Sonoma. I'm talking about
the City of Sonoma.

Obie: Yes, I see that kind of
thing happening a lot, at least up here. How does that happen? How can that
happen? Is it that the newspaper's bottom line of accuracy and quality is so
low that it allows writers to put together any kind of story that the most
numb-minded individual might swallow?

Whit: Well, I guess that's about
the best way. They, of course, have a connection with the LA Times and the New
York Times.

Obie: Those are pretty decent
newspapers.

Whit: But it's getting worse.
They just reprint the stuff that appeals to the editor and the editor is
already brainwashed into this format and also the advertisers. Ads that they
publish about this great house that identifies with the SonomaCounty
area, the country house, and so forth…None of this makes any sense to me.

Obie: I think that the Press
Democrat does a real disservice to the population of SonomaCounty.

Whit: That's true. At a certain
time, of which I have some of the copies, the Los Angeles Times had a great
home magazine.

Obie: I remember that quite well.

Whit: When they had a good
editor…

Obie: Dan McMasters?

Whit: Yes, and then one other
person. The same way with Sunset, it depends on that person—they can just turn
over things, none of this is telling me anything. And they educate,
theoretically, all these people because not just the middle class, but the
affluent people too, read the same thing and they believe it, because they buy
the same thing.

Obie: They're probably among the
most numb-minded.

Whit: Probably that's true. Well,
we used to say that the poorest clients were the best clients and the richest
were terrible and that was too bad because the poor guys didn't have (sic) to
build anything and the rich guys didn't know how to judge it. Finally Lautner
somehow caught on to that, some guys did. Certain architects did that
nationally, they could get people with money. But even Wright for over ten
years didn't have any work. Apparently Wright had two lives: before and after
this big lapse in which he didn't do anything. I don't know what happens to the
cycle. I don't know how you affect public taste, but the media has a heck of a
lot to do with it.

Obie: Well, ignoring the town of Sonoma, what comments do
you have about North Bay
architecture, SonomaCounty architecture?

Whit: Well, of course there are
many good things, like some of the wineries. Most of it's done by San Francisco or outside
architects.

Sea Ranch is in SonomaCounty
and I consider this some of the best. You can find them but you have to hunt.
It reminds me of lots of people who come to Los Angeles and expect modern houses to be on
every corner. Los Angeles
isn't like that, you have to search and search and search.